Not Dead Things: The Dissemination of Popular Print in England and Wales, Italy, and the Low Countries, 1500-1820

Cheap print moved across Europe in surprising ways, crossing unusual distances by unusual routes and by unusual means. Pedlars, news, and cheap print defy the conventional categories and models of distribution: we need to think about their extraordinary diversity, and about the means by which their unstable cultural images inflect distribution. Books were not dead things, and the examination of Italy, the Netherlands and Britain, three regions that contain instructive parallels and contrasts, reveals their unpredictable liveliness. This collection of essays, which emerges from transnational dialogues about pedlars and commerce and communication, examines the various means by which cheap print moved across Europe, and the cultural and material and economic premises of the European landscape of print.

Contributors include: Alberto Milano; Jason Peacey; Jeroen Salman; Jo Thijssen; Joad Raymond; Joop Koopmans; Karen Bowen; Kate Peters; Melissa Calaresu; Roeland Harms; Rosa Salzberg; Sean Shesgreen.

Roeland Harms is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Utrecht University in the NWO project Popularization and Media Strategies, 1700-1900 and Lecturer at Radboud University, Nijmegen. His PhD thesis Pamfletten en publieke opinie. Massamedia in de zeventiende eeuw was published in 2011.

Joad Raymond is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of various books on early-modern literature and book history, including Milton’s Angels (2010).

Jeroen Salman is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. Until 2010 he led the NWO-funded project The Pedlar and the Dissemination of the Printed Word; currently he leads the NWO project Popularization and Media Strategies, 1700-1900.